The Liberal Establishment Denounces the 'Big Beautiful Bill' But It Worked Hard To Make It Easy for the Conservative Representatives to Vote For It
Read the gory details here
Here is how the liberal establishment (NPR and other local liberal media such as my hometown paper, the Oh-So-Liberal Boston Globe that is owned by the billionaire John Henry, liberal pundits, etc.) have HELPED Trump get his “Big Beautiful Bill” passed by the House of Representatives despite the fact that it cuts Medicaid and related social safety net provisions for the poorest people, many of whom voted for Trump, while giving the richest a big tax cut.
The liberal establishment helped get this horrible anti-working-class bill passed by doing this:
Liberals for a long time have been promoting the idea that things such as food and health care and shelter are “The Right of ALL” (see my earlier article about what’s wrong with this notion here.) Liberals have been promoting, for example, the Universal Basic Income idea (see my earlier post about it here.) UBI is a plan for the government to use tax money to send substantial sums of money each month to everybody, no strings attached. This would enable freeloaders, people who can work but who refuse to work, to live off the fruits of the labor done by those who do work—the taxpayers.
The reason Congressional representatives are able to vote for the “Big Beautiful Bill” despite the fact that it harms many of their constituents including the ones who voted for them, is this. The “Big Beautiful Bill” is promoted by the conservative media as a bill the purpose of which is to prevent freeloading at the expense of people who work and pay taxes. And the liberal media don’t deny that the Bill has the purpose the Conservatives say it does; they just oppose the Bill because it cuts the social safety net, period.
To illustrate this I will use this (very liberal) Boston Globe article about the House passage of the Bill. The article is online here but possibly behind a paywall for you, so I will quote from it. Here’s the headline and lead paragraph:
Now let’s see how the Boston Globe characterizes what the Bill actually says. It reports:
The bill would require Medicaid recipients between the ages of 19 and 64 to work, train, or volunteer at least 80 hours a month, unless they are disabled or have dependent children, among other exceptions.
…
Work requirements would also be levied on more recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. In addition to those already required to work, recipients with children above the age of 6, including grandparents up to age 65, would have to work — or be enrolled in job training or community service — at least 20 hours a week to receive benefits for more than three months.
And yes, the Boston Globe article includes words about how some people can’t find jobs or lack the transportation to get to them.
But—and this is key!—the Boston Globe, typical of the liberal media, never refutes its freeloader-friendly notion about things being “The Right of All”; and hence the Boston Globe never advocates the egalitarian principle that people should have to be making a good faith effort to work reasonably according to ability1 in order to qualify for the social safety net benefits.
Essentially, the liberal and conservative establishment have worked together to frame public discourse so as to totally exclude the egalitarian principle of “From each according to reasonable ability, to each according to need or reasonable desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need”; instead the liberal and conservative media act as a team to give people the horrible choice of either:
#1) Take taxes from those who work in order to give safety net benefits even to those who can work but who refuse to work (freeloaders); and keep our society one in which there are some very rich and some very poor
OR
#2) Use taxes from those who work to give safety net assistance ONLY to those who work and to those who meet unreasonably difficult requirements to prove that they are unable to work, but not to freeloaders; and keep our society one in which there are some very rich and some very poor.
Look, for example, below at some of the comments to the Boston Globe article, and please note that even though Boston is a liberal town and the Boston Globe article says the Bill is morally wrong, nonetheless these comments in support of the Bill, which comments all express essentially the egalitarian ANTI-freeloader view, all got far more “Like”s than “Dislike”s. This demonstrates how much support there would be and CAN be for an egalitarian revolutionary movement is we start organizing that explicitly.
In the absence of an explicitly egalitarian revolutionary movement, the liberal and conservative establishment are able to get many have-nots to support attacks on themselves such as the “Big Beautiful Bill” by framing these attacks as what is necessary to stop freeloading.
Here are the comments to the Boston Globe article that make this point:
The Moral of the Story
If we want our world to be morally just, based on the egalitarian values of no-rich-and-no-poor equality and mutual aid and fairness and truth and hence on the economic principle of “From each according to reasonable ability, to each according to need or reasonable desire with scarce things equitably rationed according to need,” then we need to REJECT BOTH LIBERALISM AND CONSERVATISM and champion the egalitarian values that the vast majority of the population share.
Most people, whether they’ve ever heard the word or not, are egalitarians. Egalitarians, being reasonable people, will no doubt count children and retired elderly and people physically or mentally or for any other reason unable to work as "working reasonably" even though they do no work, and likewise deem it "reasonable work" when people care for their own or other children or for other sick adults or attend school or apprentice programs to learn skills so as to be able to work in the future. Also, being reasonable people, egalitarians will no doubt take into account, when deciding how much work is reasonable, how onerous or unpleasant or dangerous some kinds of work are compared to other kinds.